The invention of the high-five

(Yes, I’m still the guy that high-fives.) I had no idea what the story of the invention of the high-five entailed. Jon Mooallem at ESPN Magazine writes about the inventor, gay baseball player Glenn Burke, who had a hard time with rumors of his homosexuality in the 1970s, which led to him going to Oakland and eventually leaving professional baseball:

After unproductive years in 1978 and ’79, Burke hoped for a fresh start in 1980 under new A’s manager Billy Martin. But the gay rumors followed him to Oakland. Martin threw the word “faggot” around the clubhouse and didn’t play Burke. Some teammates even avoided showering with him. Burke, accustomed to being the heart of the clubhouse, felt crippled by the discomfort he was causing. His unhappiness was compounded by a knee injury and a demotion to Triple-A. After playing just 25 games in the minors in 1980, he abruptly retired, feeling it was his only option.

He was 27 years old. “It’s the first thing in my life I ever backed down from,” he later said.

Burke started hanging around San Francisco’s Castro district. He became a star shortstop in a local gay softball league and dominated in the Gay Softball World Series. “I was making money playing ball and not having any fun,” he said of his time in the majors. “Now I’m not making money, but I’m having fun.” Jack McGowan, a friend in the Castro who has since passed away, once said of Burke: “He was a hero to us. He was athletic, clean cut, masculine. He was everything that we wanted to prove to the world that we could be.”

In the Castro, Burke’s creation of the high five was part of this Herculean mystique. He would regularly sit on the hood of a car — whichever one happened to be parked in front of a gay bar called the Pendulum Club — flash his magnetic smile and high-five everyone who walked by. In 1982, Burke came out publicly in an Inside Sports magazine profile called “The Double Life of a Gay Dodger.” The writer, a gay activist named Michael J. Smith, appropriated the high five as a defiant symbol of gay pride. Rising from the wreckage of Burke’s aborted baseball career, Smith wrote, was “a legacy of two men’s hands touching, high above their heads.”

Just add that with Gary Glitter and Freddie Mercury to your list of sports cliches that came straight from gay Americans.

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